August 4, 2025
5 min read
Qualys
Discover how Qualys Agentic AI revolutionizes cybersecurity with autonomous risk prioritization and remediation at machine speed.
From Exposure Whack-a-Mole to Autonomous Cyber Risk Management: Meet Agentic AI on the Qualys Platform
Cyber threats are increasing in both volume and sophistication, while the enterprise attack surface continues to expand. This puts immense pressure on security teams, who are already overwhelmed by tool sprawl and a flood of disconnected findings—often lacking the context needed to prioritize based on business impact. To make matters worse, most security tools remain reactive, leaving teams stuck in manual workflows and struggling to close persistent exposures. Cybersecurity teams inundated with security findings from dozens of tools face a critical challenge of centralizing and democratizing access to millions of exposure signals and turning them into clear, actionable insights. Dashboards overflow with exposures, risk scores, and asset inventories, but translating that noise into intelligent action is still a reactive, time-consuming, manual process. What’s missing is a fully integrated and autonomous system that not only identifies but also prioritizes, remediates, and adapts to the dynamic threat landscape.Qualys Unveils Native Agentic AI Capabilities
Today, Qualys announces the launch of the Qualys AI Fabric — a major leap forward in enabling autonomous cybersecurity. With the introduction of specialized Cyber Risk Agents as your digital workforce, and the prompt-driven Cyber Risk Assistant, Qualys sets a new industry benchmark for proactive, intelligent risk management. By embedding Agentic AI into Enterprise TruRisk Management (ETM), Qualys elevates risk orchestration—enabling faster, smarter decision-making. ETM, the foundation of the industry’s first Risk Operations Center (ROC), aggregates exposures to quantify, communicate, and reduce cyber risk in business terms. Now enhanced with AI fabric, it delivers pre-built Cyber Risk Agents that automate threat prioritization and guide remediation strategies aligned to each organization’s risk posture. These specialized Cyber Risk Agents operate autonomously and act as your skilled digital workforce to augment your security teams. The new Cyber Risk Assistant—an intuitive, prompt-based interface—further empowers teams to translate complex exposure data into clear, context-driven actions with autonomous execution.What is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI represents the next phase of AI innovation, going beyond generative AI. Unlike systems that merely process user prompts into outputs, agentic systems act autonomously, taking necessary steps to solve problems based on context, learning, and clear directives. For cybersecurity, these capabilities are game-changing. Adversaries are weaponizing and exploiting vulnerabilities across the digital attack surface at an unprecedented pace. Security teams are overwhelmed by millions of exposures compounded by an expanding attack surface, making it challenging to prioritize, understand, and act on this information in real time. While having a centralized place for exposure data is crucial, remediating exposures at the speed they are detected requires self-orchestrating AI agents operating at machine scale to rapidly analyze data, generate insights, and autonomously remediate risks. Agentic AI doesn’t just detect issues or surface insights; it autonomously identifies critical risks, prioritizes them, and launches targeted remediation workflows to reduce risks.Qualys Agentic AI
Agentic AI is seamlessly integrated into the Qualys ecosystem to enhance security operations and enable smarter decision-making. It continuously analyzes millions of exposure signals, combining live threat intelligence with your organization’s unique business context. The result is a clear distillation of the cyber risks that truly matter, enabling security professionals to focus on what’s important. To explore the under-the-hood implementation of the Qualys AI Fabric, check out the technical deep-dive blog by Balaji Venkatesan.See Agentic AI in action by signing up for a preview of Qualys ETM today! Sign Up Now
Two Major Innovations to Streamline and Accelerate Cyber Risk Operations
Marketplace of Ready-to-use Cyber Risk AI Agents
The Qualys Agentic AI marketplace offers pre-built Cyber Risk Agents as a skilled digital workforce tailored to specific use cases. Organizations can also create custom Cyber Risk Agents with an intuitive no-code builder to autonomously deliver specialized outcomes. These agents empower decision-making across all levels—tackling operational challenges in real time or delivering insightful reports for board-level briefings. By transforming fragmented data into actionable intelligence, Agentic AI strengthens security operations and drives efficient risk management.Cyber Risk Assistant
The prompt-driven Cyber Risk Assistant democratizes access to diverse security data by helping users navigate and evaluate their risk posture with natural-language queries. It analyzes exposures, applies threat intelligence, and factors in your unique environment to deliver tailored insights, turning data into informed action. Whether presenting to the board or making urgent operational decisions, the assistant quickly surfaces needed information and can introduce a Cyber Risk Agent for a more autonomous experience.Key Benefits of Qualys Agentic AI
- Democratized Data Access: Streamlines exploration of fragmented security data, empowering the entire security team to transform curiosity into actionable insights.
- Intelligent Decision Support: Provides business impact-driven analytics that convert fragmented data into ranked, actionable insights.
- Enhanced Productivity: Drives productivity through autonomous risk reduction with human oversight, reducing MTTR significantly and allowing security teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
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Use Cases for Agentic AI
Agent Nova: Discover and Prioritize External Attack Surface Risk
Security teams face an ever-increasing external attack surface, with organizations often unaware of up to 25% of their internet-facing assets. Qualys Agent Nova continuously identifies newly discovered internet-facing assets and exposures without manual prompts or dashboard digging. It prioritizes vulnerability scans based on risky open ports, EoL/EoS software, or potential vulnerabilities, correlating findings with threat intelligence tailored to the organization’s industry and environment. Agent Nova also generates comprehensive “Hacker’s-Eye View” reports revealing what attackers see and target.Agent Vikram: Adaptive Cloud Risk Assessment
In sprawling multi-cloud environments, visibility is often incomplete. Qualys research found over 30% of cloud VMs across AWS, Azure, and GCP run with high or critical vulnerabilities, many unscanned. Agent Vikram autonomously discovers unmonitored assets and applies the right scan method for each workload—API-based, agent-based, snapshot-based, or cloud perimeter scanning—without human intervention. This eliminates cloud blind spots, providing continuous, unified visibility and control.Agent Chang: Audit-readiness Assessment & Reporting
Audit readiness is critical but challenging without automation. Agent Chang automates continuous evidence collection and audit-ready reporting across assets and environments. It maps evidence to compliance frameworks like ISO, NIST, PCI-DSS, and FedRAMP in real time, ensuring audit readiness. By prioritizing control failures impacting audit scores, it helps focus remediation and delivers dynamic dashboards and reports, making audit preparation proactive and data-driven.Agent Nyra: Threat-informed Risk Prioritization
Facing a surge in sophisticated attacks and overwhelming threat data, security teams struggle to focus on critical risks. Agent Nyra autonomously monitors adversary behavior and threat intelligence relevant to the organization’s industry and environment. It alerts teams to critical threats and can initiate playbooks for patching or mitigation based on intelligence.Agent Sara: Autonomous Patch Tuesday Lifecycle
IT teams face challenges in deploying Patch Tuesday patches, with about 20% of Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities remaining open over 30 days. Agent Sara detects these vulnerabilities and creates a comprehensive Risk Elimination Plan with actionable insights. It prioritizes vulnerabilities from the CISA KEV catalog, those with public exploits, or ransomware links, ensuring SLAs are met and assets remain secure and compliant with PCI DSS, CIS, and NCSC timelines. When patches risk downtime, Agent Sara identifies and applies mitigations to make vulnerabilities unexploitable until patches can be safely deployed, managing the entire patch lifecycle autonomously.Agent Sophia: Self-Healing Autonomous Vulnerability Management
Agent Sophia overcomes the limitations of scan-and-report vulnerability management. Using a multi-agent AI system, it autonomously discovers vulnerabilities, prioritizes them based on real-time business context, and executes the full remediation lifecycle with human-on-the-loop control. This ensures actions are explainable, auditable, and governed by safety policies, allowing teams to focus on strategic risk reduction. Qualys Threat Research shows 5% of CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities remain unpatched over 90 days, while threat actors weaponize these in just 5.5 days. Customers using Qualys TruRisk close critical flaws proactively. Agent Sophia’s self-healing capability executes enterprise-grade workflows autonomously, closing the gap between detection and remediation at machine speed.Conclusion
Agentic AI redefines risk management by making security operations smarter, faster, and more cost-effective. Autonomous workflows reduce complexity and accelerate processes, enabling confident protection of expanding attack surfaces while optimizing resources. This innovative approach empowers teams to shift from reactive measures to proactive security strategies. With Agentic AI, the future of autonomous cybersecurity is here.Try Qualys ETM today and preview your digital workforce, Agentic AI by Qualys. Try Today
Originally published at Qualys Blog on August 4, 2025.